icemann on 19/12/2017 at 11:08

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Greetings.

As mentioned in the "What are you making?" thread. I'm in the beginning stages of developing a game which features crosswords as it's main game mechanic. To that end I'd like to have 100+ levels in the game. Only trouble being that putting even one crossword takes some time with fitting words within the letters of adjoining words etc etc. So this is a call for assistance from you all, as with your help I'll get to that 100+ level amount sooner.

All you'll need to do is create a crossword in the editor I'll supply and just pm me back with the .dat file which the levels are saved as. Its all quite simple really. Only requirements will be:

So the rules:

* Keep it family friendly with the words
* Stick to Scrabble / Upwords rules with the words. So no use of "the" or "its" and no abbreviated words (eg TV) or slang.
* Try and make use of every letter of the alphabet when possible. Since the letters given to players will be randomized.

I've got 10 levels done so far (5 from me, 5 from the wife). The more I can have in the better.

Full credit (in the games credits and readme) will be given to any who take the time to do any. If need be I'll do them all myself which is fine. Thinking of good words to put in that fit within other words and that make use of unused (as of that point) letters is the time consuming part. So the more I have available, the quicker I can get onto the coding of the actual game itself. Just wanting to have atleast 100 available before I jump into that, as the rules of the game will be super simple.

You can grab the level editor - (http://www.mediafire.com/file/b7gd69a1zkkw9gh/Level%20Editor.zip) Here

Controls:

Mouse - Left click to add tiles, right click to remove them.

Keyboard:

C - Change layer (currently toggles between layers 0 and 1)
D - Delete all tiles on all layers and reset current level back to default size
k - Save map under a specific name.
H - Hide/Enable information status bars
M - Bring up editor menu - From here you can do some other features (eg save as, create new level etc etc).
R - Reload Level from last saved version
S - Save currently loaded map
< - Back one texture in current layer
> - Forward one texture in current layer
[ - Decrement Current Level displayed
] - Increment Current Level displayed
Space - Place texture/Object at current mouse position

If you run into any problems let me know either here, or via PM and I'll assist. Editor can be a bit confusing to use at first but will make sense once you get how it works. The games going to end up looking something like:

http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/fc28/gsdm19fqydq7uwbzg.jpg?size_id=5

So yeah. Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

icemann on 20/12/2017 at 18:15

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No limitations really. I included with the download link the 10 done by myself and my wife. We initially just tried to fill them with as many words as we could think up, then later on I added a bit more game design orientation into it and added some design rules to try and use as many letters of the alphabet as possible. So we'd start off adding a few long words, then with adjoining ones try and add words that had 1 or more letters that had so far been unused.

To give a bit more info on the gameplay:

The players will from the get go, see the crossword with all letters already displayed. As it's 2 player (2 human players or 1 vs computer) and a score attack type game of trying to get the highest score to win, each player will 1 by 1 have their 20 letters revealed. For every instance of a letter (of the newly revealed letter) on the board they'll get points. Players have 3 re-rolls that they can use, if their not happy with the letter they got, or want to gamble on getting a better one.

Simple gameplay rules, so this game in theory should not be difficult to put together.

PS - Thanks to qolelis for a crossword he contributed. Very nice work on that one. Hope to see more :).

Thirith on 20/12/2017 at 18:42

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I think this may be different from country to country; at the very least, I know that UK crosswords look pretty different from the ones you get in Germany and Switzerland. Aesthetically, the symmetrical ones are nicer, though.

Yakoob on 21/12/2017 at 09:10

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Why not randomly generate the crosswords? It can't be that hard, and there's probably already an algorithm for it somewhere. Just feed a big batch of random words (like copying a (https://www.gutenberg.org/) whole chapter from a popular book).

qolelis on 21/12/2017 at 13:49

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In Sweden we have all sorts, but the most common one is free-form with the clues written inside the crossword instead of listed at the side, and often there are as few non-letter squares as possible. I can try a symmetrical one next time.